US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to set up a 30,000-person facility for undocumented migrants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Trump said the facility – which is separate to the high-security US military prison also located there – will be used to house “criminal illegal aliens” that are deemed to pose a public safety risk in the US.
Facilities at Guantanamo Bay have long been used to house immigrants, sometimes eliciting condemnation from human rights organisations.
Cuba’s government swiftly condemned the announcement, accusing the US of torture and illegal detention on “occupied” land on the island.
The US administration’s new border tsar, Tom Homan, said that an existing migrant detention centre at the base would be expanded amid an increase in migrant detentions and deportations during the Trump administration.
Trump’s announcement came as he signed the so-called Laken Riley act into law, requiring undocumented immigrants who are arrested for theft or violent crimes to be held in jail pending trial.
The bill, named after Laken Riley – a Georgia nursing student murdered last year by a Venezuelan man, was approved by Congress last week, an early legislative win for the administration.
At a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Trump said that the Executive Order would instruct the departments of defence and homeland security to “begin preparing” the 30,000 facility.
“Most people don’t even know about it,” he said, adding that it would be used to detain the “worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back,” he added. “So we’re going to send them to Guantanamo….it’s a tough place to get out.”
According to Trump, the facility will double the US capacity to hold undocumented migrants.
The US has already been using a facility in Guantanamo – known as the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC) – for decades and through various administrations, both Republican and Democrat.
In a 2024 report, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) accused the government of secretly holding migrants there in “inhumane” conditions indefinitely after detaining them at sea.
A nearby prison has, for decades, held detainees taken into US custody after the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001. There are 15 prisoners there currently.
Speaking to reporters at the White House after the signing of the Laken Riley act, Trump’s border tsar, Homan said that the new facility would “expand upon the existing migrant’s centre” there.
Homan added that the migrants could be transported there directly after being intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, and that the “highest” detention standards would be applied.
It is unclear how much the facility will cost.
When asked by reporters at the White House, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said only that the money would be allotted through “reconciliation and appropriations”.
News of the facility’s expansion was met with swift condemnation by the Cuban government, which has long considered Guantanamo Bay to be “occupied” by the US.
“In act act of brutality, the new government of the US has announced it will incarcerate, at the naval base at Guantanamo, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory, thousands of forcibly expulsed migrants, who will be located near known prisons of torture and illegal detention,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X.
